Group items tagged

"The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today filed suit against an Australian record company for misusing copyright law to remove a lecture by Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig from YouTube. With co-counsel Jones Day, EFF is asking a federal judge in Massachusetts to rule that the video is lawful fair use, to stop Liberation Music from making further legal threats, and to award damages."

The Inter/National Coaliton for Electronic Portfolio Research convenes research/practitioners to study the impact of eportfolios on student learning and educational outcomes. Each year ten institutions selected through an application process constitute a three-year cohort. Each campus works on an individual project that asks "What learning is taking place as a function of electronic portfolios?" and "How do we know?" This is the supporting website.

"MITx will offer a portfolio of MIT courses for free to a virtual community of learners around the world. It will also enhance the educational experience of its on-campus students, offering them online tools that supplement and enrich their classroom and laboratory experiences. The first MITx course, 6.002x (Circuits and Electronics), will be launched in an experimental prototype form. Watch this space for further upcoming courses, which will become available in Fall 2012."

"Musical instruments produce sounds. Composers produce music. Musical instruments reproduce music. Tape recorders, radios, disc players, etc., reproduce sound. A device such as a wind-up music box produces sound and reproduces music. A phonograph in the hands of a hip hop/scratch artist who plays a record like an electronic washboard with a phonographic needle as a plectrum, produces sounds which are unique and not reproduced - the record player becomes a musical instrument. A sampler, in essence a recording, transforming instrument, is simultaneously a documenting device and a creative device, in effect reducing a distinction manifested by copyright."

"Over at Wired I found a great article on the ability of authors to self-publish their own books directly to the Sony eReader."

Good article on the emergence of e-textbooks in education and the affordances they offer.

"Which of the following predictions about the future of libraries were made by university administrators? Within five years, libraries will focus exclusively on electronic resources Academic computing and libraries will merge. Librarians who do not produce will be reassigned or fired. The library will only house materials that are actively used. Libraries will shrink, in both collection size and staffing, and funding will be redirected from libraries to more critical and productive areas of the university." Sound familiar?

"It was great to see New Zealand start-up Swiftpoint honoured at the CES show here in Vegas for the novel design of its pint-sized finger-controlled computer mouse."

"Tablet computing and personal electronic devices such as iPads promise to have a dramatic impact on education. This Ning network was created to explore new and innovative ways iPads and other portable devices could be used in schools and colleges."

Adelaide science faculty gives all 1st year students an iPad and only uses electronic text books.  Have redesigned the curriculum  and getting very positive results. Book costs for students have dropped to 60% of what they were and the uni is looking to move entirely to free online resources.

"Late Friday, the federal district court in Nevada issued a declaratory judgment that makes is harder for copyright holders to file lawsuits over excerpts of material and burden online forums and their users with nuisance lawsuits." The judgment - part of the nuisance lawsuit avalanche started by copyright troll Righthaven - found that Democratic Underground did not infringe the copyright in a Las Vegas Review-Journal newspaper article when a user of the online political forum posted a five-sentence excerpt, with a link back to the newspaper's website. 

We only had four in our WCELfest2011 tagline!

Resources on clickers - student response systems.

Professional Advisory by Ontario College of Teachers on the use of social media. Don't think I agree with it all but lots of reasonable stuff.

Remember, not everything you see or hear is copyright!